Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto, KCB, FRS (born 7 October 1939), born Harold Walter Krotoschiner, is a British chemist and one of the three recipients to share the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England with his name being of Silesian origin. Both his parents were born in Berlin but came to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from the Nazis because his father was Jewish.
In 1961 he obtained a first class BSc honours degree in chemistry at the University of Sheffield, followed in 1964 by a PhD at the same institution.
After postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Bell Laboratories in the USA he began teaching and research at the University of Sussex in England in 1967. He became a full professor in 1985, and a Royal Society Research Professor from 1991–2001.
From 2002-2004 he served as President of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposia in 2006 and 2007.
He spoke at Auburn University on April 29, 2010, and at the James T. Baker Institute at Rice University with Robert Curl on October 13, 2010.
In October 2010 Kroto will be participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize winning Scientist.
He is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.